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CURE Director Selected as Penn Institute for Urban Research Scholar

Paul Jargowsky, director of the Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE) at Rutgers–Camden, has been selected as a Penn Institute for Urban Research (Penn IUR) Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. The institute brings together the world’s foremost urban practitioners and policymakers to focus on critical issues affecting cities.

“I am honored and excited to have the opportunity to work with these distinguished scholars,” says Jargowsky, a professor of public policy at Rutgers–Camden. “These collaborative links create more synergy and increase communication among those who are focusing on urban issues. I anticipate that my appointment will promote collaboration between the Center for Urban Research and Education and the Penn Institute for Urban Research.”

Jargowsky noted that he and CURE Associate Director Natasha Tursi met with Penn IUR Directors Eugenie Birch and Susan Wachter earlier this year to discuss a joint conference on the concentration of poverty. Research papers presented at the conference would subsequently be published as a book, he says.

As director of the Center for Urban Research and Education, Jargowsky oversees the center’s mission to encourage, facilitate, and promote research on urban issues by Rutgers-Camden faculty and their collaborators around the nation. He also shepherds the center’s objective to train the next generation of urban scholars by providing opportunities for students to become involved with ongoing research projects.

Jargowsky’s current areas of research include racial and economic segregation, the impacts of economic and spatial inequality, and the causes and consequences of exclusionary suburban development patterns. His book, Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City, is a comprehensive examination of poverty at the neighborhood level in United States metropolitan areas between 1970 and 1990. The Urban Affairs Association named Poverty and Place the “Best Book in Urban Affairs published in 1997 or 1998.”

A resident of Philadelphia, Jargowsky has also been involved in policy development at both the state and federal levels. In 1993, he served as a visiting scholar at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he helped to design the simulation model used for welfare reform planning. In 1986, he was the project director for the New York State Task Force on Poverty and Welfare Reform. The report of the task force, “The New Social Contract: Rethinking the Nature and Purpose of Public Assistance,” was influential in reshaping the welfare reform debate. Jargowsky has also been involved as a consultant and expert witness in fair-housing and school-desegregation litigation.

He earned a doctorate in public policy in 1991, and a master of public policy in 1986, from Harvard University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, graduating magna cum laude, from Princeton University in 1980.

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